Benjamin January 3 - Graveyard by Barbara Hambly Page B

head bowed, his hand on the scaffolding of the cistern, the subliminal movements of his fingers defining and redefining its shape and grain. Then, “Who would want Isaak dead, M'sieu? I don't know. His father's mother, Madame Cordelia Jumon-I think she would have rejoiced in his death. She did what she could to take his inheritance away from him in the courts. His mother-Well, I never thought that her claim of him as her slave would hold up in court.” Nogent shook his head. “But what mother would harm her son?”
    What mother would try to have him declared her slave?
    What mother would refuse to speak of, or to, her elder daughter who disobeyed, all those many years ago? “He was a good boy, M'sieu. Not what people say, `Oh, he was a good boy. . . .' But he had a great goodness in him, a goodness of soul. Did they speak of when he would be buried? Of who would carve the plaque on his tomb? That mother of his . . .”
    “No,” said January quietly. “No body has yet been found. That's another thing I'm trying to track down. If he was in trouble, was there anyone Isaak would have gone to? He was missing for four days before his death.”
    “It depends on the trouble,” Nogent said at last. “His uncle Mathurin, I would think. Perhaps his father-in-law. But they both loved Célie. If either of them knew a single thing of this crime, they would not suffer her to be accused. She is . . . a girl of great sweetness, M'sieu. And great forbearance. She is a girl who does not get angry; but that night, when she'd heard all that his mother had done with the warrant, and the Guards out looking for him, and an advertisement in the paper calling him a runaway slave . . . she came into the kitchen where I was sitting, and she kicked the side of the hearth, kicked it and kicked it and kicked it, not saying a word, because she was well-taught and well-bred, but with tears of anger running down her face. Whoever has said that she had anything, anything to do with his death is a fool.”
    January was silent, thinking about the young man dying in the big house alone, the young man who whispered, I have been poisoned. And then, Célie. And died.
    There's a thousand reasons men will think a woman poisoned a man.
    But which woman? January walked along Rue Dumaine in the wet, gathering dusk. Who else could give “no good account of themselves” on the night of Isaak Jumon's death?
    In the Place d'Armes, gulls squabbled with pelicans over the garbage of the fruit stands while the women closed up their shops. The brick arcades of the market were dark save for lanterns around the coffee stand, and the world smelled of wet sewage, coffee, and the slow black rivers of soot disgorged by the steamboats into the sullen sky. A snatch of song touched him, where a lateworking gang heaved cords of wood aboard the Missourian:
    Kimbebo, nayro, dilldo, kiro,
    Stimstam, formididdle, all-a-board-la rake . . .
    African words, the wailing rhythm a thing of the bones and the heart rather than the mind.
    Rose Vitrac was in her room above and behind a grocery on Rue de la Victoire, a slim gawky woman dressed neatly in contrast to the assortment of slatterns and market-women occupying the rest of the building. As January's shadow darkened the doorway, she raised her head from the pile of Latin examinations that had overflowed her small desk onto bed, spare chair, and floor.
    “Ignorant little toads,” she remarked dispassionately and propped her gold-rimmed spectacles more firmly onto the bridge of her nose. Half a dozen candles burned in a cheap brass branch on the desk, different lengths and colors, bought half-consumed from the servants of the rich. “Why don't Creoles bother to educate their children? Or make certain they're actually studying what their tutors are paid to teach? Here's one who seems to think Cicero was merely something that was served at Roman banquets.”
    “I'm sure if Mark Antony could have arranged it he would have